Storm Season

Bill’s thirty-eight-foot cabin cruiser, Ten-Ninety-Eight, police code for “mission accomplished,” was docked at the end of one of several piers. It appeared closed and deserted, but as Roger and I approached, I could hear the hum of air-conditioning. I’d already spotted Bill’s SUV in the parking lot, so I knew he was aboard. I stepped from the dock to the rear deck and tapped on the sliders that opened onto the lounge, Bill’s tiny but efficient living area.

When he opened the glass door, my heart did a little flip-flop at the sight of him, making me feel like a teenager again instead of a forty-nine-year-old. Even at sixty, Bill was a man who turned women’s heads. Tall, tan and in terrific shape, with thick white hair and blue eyes, he grew more handsome with age. But today those baby blues had no twinkle when they greeted me, and his usual grin had gone AWOL.

“You okay?” I asked.

He pulled me inside, closed the door behind Roger and grabbed me in a brief but fierce hug.

“We have to talk.” His tone was as serious as his expression.

Fear threatened to close my throat. For years, Bill had been pressuring me to marry him. Set in my single ways and commitment-shy, I’d dragged my feet until recently. Last Christmas, we’d set our wedding date for Valentine’s Day, still five months away, to give me time to get used to the idea of marriage, but after we’d solved our last case, I’d recognized my delaying tactics as senseless. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Bill, and we weren’t getting any younger, so what was I waiting for? We’d agreed then that we’d marry as soon as we finished furnishing the house we’d bought together a few months earlier.

Except for a few odds and ends, the house was now move-in ready. Judging by his expression, I worried now that Bill was the one getting cold feet.

I sank onto the love seat on one side of the lounge, and Bill took one of the folding director’s chairs across the room from me. Not a good sign.

“I’m listening,” I said.

Roger curled onto the sofa next to me and placed his head on my lap, as if sensing I needed comfort.

Bill’s face looked pained. “I don’t know how to say this.”

In spite of his tan, his skin had a strange pallor. I prayed he wasn’t ill. I snapped my mind shut against a dozen dire possibilities.

“Just tell me.”

He took a deep breath and exhaled, like a diver getting ready to take a header off the tower. “It’s Trish.”

The years fell away, and I was once again a rookie, fresh out of the academy, with Bill Malcolm as my first partner with the Tampa Police Department. He had a wife the other male officers envied, a gorgeous woman with magnificent red hair, exotic green eyes, a curvaceous figure and a sense of humor that kept everyone around her smiling. Bill and Trish also had a six-year-old daughter, Melanie. The perfect family.

Until the strain of having a husband who put his life on the line every day finally broke Trish’s nerves and their marriage. The end came right after I’d saved Bill from being hacked to death by a machete-wielding wife abuser. I’d had to put three rounds in the guy’s chest to stop him, the only time in my career I’d ever fired my weapon. Bill was safe, but the what-might-have-been had sent Trish over the edge. She filed for divorce, moved to Seattle and took their daughter Melanie with her.

And she’d broken Bill’s heart. He had still loved her and eventually had come to realize that she’d loved him, too, and the only way she could end the marriage that was destroying her emotionally had been to put a continent between them.

At first, Melanie had returned to Tampa for summer visits with her dad, but as she reached adolescence, she had wanted to remain in Seattle with her friends—and her stepfather. Trish’s new husband, an accountant, had a nice safe job where no one would try to kill him, unless he was caught cooking the books by a client with a temper and the means for murder—highly unlikely for the straight-arrow Harvey in his safe suburban practice.

So over the twenty-three years since the divorce, Bill had lost touch with both Trish and Melanie and, to my amazement and delight, had fallen in love with me. Even when Melanie had married and had had children, she hadn’t encouraged her father to participate in their lives, a crying shame since Bill would have been a first-class grandfather.

“What about Trish?” I asked.

My first thought had been that she’d died. She was Bill’s contemporary, after all, and not everyone lived to the ripe old age of the Lassiter sisters.

He spread his hands in a gesture of either appeal or frustration. I couldn’t tell. “She’s back.”

“Back in Tampa?”

He shook his head, looking more uncomfortable than I’d ever seen him.

Roger, sensing the tension crackling in the tiny cabin, sat up and looked from me to Bill and back and whined softly.

A devastating second thought hit me. “Trish is back with you?”

“God, no,” Bill said immediately and with such emphasis, I exhaled in relief. “But it’s complicated.”

“Apparently,” I said with too much sarcasm, “or I’d have some clue what the hell is going on. You said Trish is back. Exactly where is she?”

The pained expression returned to Bill’s face, but he raised his chin and looked me in the eye. “She’s living in our house.”

CHAPTER 3

“What?” I shook my head, thinking I’d heard wrong.

“I left her there until I could talk with you.”

“You left your ex-wife in our house?” I couldn’t believe it. The entire exchange sounded like the script for a bad soap opera. “Why?”

“Harvey dumped her for a younger model.”

“So she’s come running back to you?” Insecurity gripped me. Bill had loved Trish, she was the mother of his only child, and now she wasn’t just a distant memory three thousand miles away. She was right here in Pelican Bay.

In our house.

“She called late last night, hysterical,” he explained. “Not only did Harvey leave her for a younger woman, but he’d planned every detail of his escape before Trish had a hint that anything was wrong. The creep cleaned out their joint accounts and canceled her credit cards. The deed to their house was already in Harvey’s name only, and he demanded that she move out. What could I do? Trish had nowhere to go.”

“She has a daughter.”

Bill pushed his fingers through his hair and frowned. “Trish called Melanie, but Melanie sided with Harvey. Said if Trish had been a better wife, Harvey wouldn’t have left her. Trish asked Melanie if she could stay with her until she can get back on her feet, but Melanie told her that in her present emotional state, Trish would upset the children.”

Years ago, Bill and I had often discussed how Trish had spoiled Melanie, as if trying to make up to her daughter for the divorce. Now Melanie’s resulting self-centeredness was coming back to bite her mother.

“Trish was desperate, or she wouldn’t have called me,” Bill said. “And she is the mother of my only child. What else could I do?” he repeated.

He could have hung up on her, I thought, like I would have. But Bill was a better person than I’d ever be, another of the reasons I loved him so much.

“I wired her money for a plane ticket,” he continued, “picked her up at the Tampa Airport at noon and left her at the house until I could talk to you.”

“You could have taken her to a motel.”

“I tried, but Labor Day weekend’s coming up. Every decent motel or hotel in the area is booked solid.”

“How long do you intend for her to stay at our place?” I tried but couldn’t keep the hostility from my voice.

Bill rose from his chair, crossed the cabin, sat next to me, and took both my hands in his. “I love you, Margaret. Whatever there was between Trish and me is over and done. Dead. I’m not the same man I was all those years ago.”

But he’d loved Trish before, a nagging little voice in my head insisted. And if he’s around her long enough, he might love her again.

“If you don’t want her in our house,” he said, “say the word. I’ll find someplace else, even if I have to rent Abe Mackley’s guest room.”

Abe, now retired, had been a detective with us in Tampa. I doubted his wife wanted Trish around any more than I did.